Ugh, I'm so glad this exists; I tried some text adventures a few years ago and struggled to get into them due in part to having to cooperate with a rather baroque user interface.
I feel like this could really open them up to a new generation.
Many toys can be physically dampened, but another way is throwing a resistor in parallel across the speaker. I did this with a Little People princess castle my daughter had when she was very young and it was quite a nice way to do it— same bright and unmuffled music when you put the dolls on the stand, but at about 20% the volume.
Brad Pitt as Rusty: "Don't use seven words when four will do. Don't shift your weight, look always at your mark but don't stare, be specific but not memorable, be funny but don't make him laugh. He's got to like you then forget you the moment you've left his side. And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances..."
> And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't, under any circumstances...
I’ve only seen the movie when it came out, so I didn’t remember this scene and thought you might’ve been doing the ellipsis yourself. So I checked it out. For anyone else curious, the character was interrupted.
I do the same with my Switch 1— just set the thing up with its kickstand on the tray table and use a normal pad. No amount of slide-on grips or whatever else really make the joycons usable for more than a few minutes with adult hands.
At risk of being excessively sassy this looks like a case of wanting the ergonomics of multiple inheritance without fully grappling with the complexities or implications of it.
In most cases people just want any inheritance, this is the backwards way the Golang devs decided to implement it based on their 80s view of programming languages.
I bet their telemetry shows that a lot of people grab a quick charge while in the shower or the like, and that 10mins is a good amount of time for that.
Or put another way, past ten mins it’s just as likely the phone will be plugged in for hours or overnight and the charge speed is irrelevant.
It would be interesting to try to have actual registration so that the embossed design can interact with the printed copy rather that just being an arbitrary background decoration.
The way I understand your comment is you could have a scene or objects printed on a card, then line up an embossed design over the print to create depth or imprint specific areas of the print creating various effects. That would be interesting
I think it should be relatively straightforward to set up something like that with build123d[1]. You can load the emboss pattern from an SVG and project it on the surface of a cylinder with `project_faces()`[2]. Some positive/negative extrusion and some added keyholes and you're done.
i thought about that, but i think doing that to cardboard is more likely to cut the letters. you can't really make the patterns to narrow to think. although you could emboss an outline of the text
The embossed numbers were used to transfer the details quickly and reliably. A roller would apply pressure to press special paper onto upraised letters and numbers. The seller would hand write the amount and the buyer would sign. Two copies were made simultaneously (carbon impregnated paper) and separated and a copy kept by each party.
Its a far cry from paying by bonk and your phone beeping a few seconds later to indicate your bank has already registered the transaction!
You mean business or credit card? Credit Cards I believe was embossing, you had the negative of the numbers on the back. They did that because before you had electronic card readers, merchant were taking credit card payments by making a carbon copy of the credit card number on the invoice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter
exactly, that's what i thought. must be one of those: it was always done that way, or maybe just, the banks bought machines to print the cards from the US or where they still do that (do they actually?) or simply those machines were cheaper, or who cares, its not like there is a downside to embossing the numbers. it could also be estonians who fled to the US in the previous century returning and bringing back their idea of how it should be done.
i was visiting the baltics in the early 90s and i head that people were desperate to get anything from the west after being cut of for so long.
It's astonishing how bad the US political apparatus is at making progress even on matters that easily fall within that 80%, though— healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments.
All of this stuff should be a slam dunk to implement with broad coalitions no matter who holds which branches, and yet it's all been basically gridlocked for decades, and instead it's never-ending turmoil over meaningless nonsense like who uses what bathrooms.
>healthcare reform, childcare, higher education, common sense gun laws, infrastructure investments.
Funny you imagine there is consensus with any of that. The right doesn't want government healthcare. They don't want government sponsored childcare. They could care less about higher education. They want no gun laws. And they don't want black people to benefit from infrastructure.
Outside of the 24hr news bubble, I believe the reality is that there is a lot of common ground on these supposed hot button issues, for example on the guns issue alone there is broad support for universal background checks and an assault weapons ban:
But it's hard to make it happen when Fox paints any kind of gun measure as crazy leftist tyranny and then deep-pocketed fringe organizations like the NRA vow to punish any Republican who collaborates on compromise measures.
About the only thing there is consensus on between the parties, vs americans at large, is banning gun sales to the mentally ill. In terms of assault weapons ban there is a substantial divide between republicans and democrats. Your source shows this too.
A small number of extremely wealthy individuals have a vested interest in fomenting that division, because the solutions to those 80% issues happens to conflict with their business interests.
Its not like the US hasn't done big ambitious things before: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Hell didn't they help develop some of the social programs for Post WWII Europe/Japan etc?
Post Nixon the government really just got captured and paralyzed and so a generation has grown up not understanding that this is a deliberately broken government, not how a government can operate. Instead people have been raised to think that all government is just ineffective and naturally broken. The only people who actually get it are the subset of Americans who have traveled or lived overseas for some time. As of 2023 only about half of Americans have a passport so there is a large chunk that haven't seen anything else.
These were one thing, The New Deal. Done by Democrats who had 90% control of congress, a hyper popular president, and 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. When the Supreme Court threatened to push back on The New Deal, FDR threatened that he could pack the court, and that threat carried weight because he actually had the congress to do so, and the public would have been on his side as well. The public wanted The New Deal.
Then the Progressive Democrats got big support on the Civil Rights bill. That support was also used to force, through Federal power, a bunch of sourthern states to stop segregation and other literal racist bullshit. Many federal politicians blamed that on the Democrat party (which is untrue, both support and opposition to the Civil Rights act were bipartisan), and southern states have largely voted Republican since.
Then Carter's "Lets do clean energy and a strong environment and do the hard things to make a good nation" were so thoroughly rejected by the American public that it is considered a huge political realignment, and the Democrat party responded by giving up, and adopting neoliberal policies because they were so fucking popular with the public, that they might as well get rich and elected.
As a result, the Clinton years got us the damn Crime Bill. We also got the Nutrition Facts panel on food, and that thing is awesome in ways I think most people don't realize.
Then, when Obama came close to having real power in congress, we got the ACA.
If you want to see this nation do things, give the people who want to build things actual power. Give the Democrats actual damn power. Not "President and half of one house of congress". That's not how power works in the US system when you are following the rules.
If the Democrats got 60 senators, 400 reps, and the president, maaaybe then they could get something done, but even then, the Supreme Court could trivially stop anything they tried to do.
This is all intentional. It's how the American system was purposely designed. It's hard to build things on purpose.
Alan Weisman's lovely book World Without Us speculates a bit about this, basically saying that more recently built structures would be the first to collapse because they've all be engineered so close to the line. Meanwhile stuff that already been standing for 100+ years like the Brooklyn Bridge will probably still be there in another 100 years even without any maintenance just on account of how overbuilt it all had to be in an era before finite element analysis.
There was an aluminum extrusion company that falsified test records for years. They got away with it because what's a few % when your customer's safety factor is 2. Once they got into weight sensitive aerospace applications, where sometimes the factor is 1.2, rockets starting blowing up on the launch pad.
It did result in jail time. The linked document states that the testing lab supervisor was sentenced to 3 years. (Not sure how much of that time was actually served, apparently he was suffering from dementia.) More info: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/08/company_supervis...
I feel like this could really open them up to a new generation.
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